2017

by Murzban Jal
The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content—here the content (…)

EDITORIAL
From all available information, the Ninth BRICS Summit at Xiamen in southeastern China has been a success from the Indian standpoint. Not only were the substantive talks between China’s President Xi Jinping and PM Narendra Modi most constructive in terms of maintaining peace along the Sino-Indian border but the discussions within the BRICS forum also yielded a productive outcome. China and India alongwith the other three countries—Brazil, Russia and South Africa—that comprise the (…)

COMMENTARY
“Ms Lankesh was like my mother. She once told me that if you are being attacked then you know that you are on the right track... powerfull people are being killed just to send across a message to others. Her death is a personal loss to me.”
That was how former JNUSU President Kanhaiya Kumar paid his homage to Gauri Lankesh, the fearless and outspokenly frank activist-journalist who was gunned down by unidentified assailants around 8 pm outside her residence in West Bengaluru (…)

Prime Minister Modi has reshuffled his Cabinet putting an end to endless media speculation about who will be ‘in’ and who will be ‘out’. In the event, some Ministers who were found to be lacking in their performance have been shunted out, ostensibly to strengthen the party in the run-up to the general elections in 2019. What beats understanding is how a person who has failed to perform as a Minister is expected to do better as a party organiser. The induction of several former IFS, IAS and (…)

According to the RBI, 99 per cent of the demonetised currency has come back to the banks. What, in your opinion, is the significance of this statement?
What the RBI has announced now was known to it as early as on January 13, 2017. Our article in Economic and Political Weekly has shown that by that date 98.8 per cent of the demonetised notes had come back to the RBI. What has now been announced is only a confirmation of that. So the question arises: why did the RBI not reveal this fact (…)

by Anshuman Gupta, Vipul Sharma
Europe is, in a great measure, saved as a result of Donald Trump and his unviable and contradictory initiatives. The ultra-Right wave was on the rise with many far-Right parties gaining prominence in Europe, riding on the back of the downturn journey of the world economy and their appeal to the left-out natives, who could not capitalise on the liberal policies of globalisation, liberalisation and privatisation. Donald Trump also secured the White House (…)

The Supreme Court’s judgment is harsh and unequivocal. There could be no compromise on the basics of the Indian Constitution, freedom to women and men to lead their lives as they wanted. I wish the Muslim community had accepted the bar on triple talaaq, which goes against the spirit of the Constitution. But it looks as if the fundamentalists have been having their way.
This was even the case with Shah Bano, a Muslim woman, where the Supreme Court intervened and fixed alimony in 1985 after (…)

by Vahidha Nizam
The Supreme Court on August 22, 2017 gave a verdict banning instant triple talaaq. It indeed is a historic judgement in the context that it upholds equality to all irrespective of religion, caste, creed and gender as enshrined in Article 14 of the Constitution. By a 3-to-2 vote, a Supreme Court panel declared unlawful the practice in Islam that had allowed husbands to divorce their wives instantly by uttering the word talaaq (divorce) continuously in one go. In an order (…)

by Ram Puniyani
Freedom movement was an all-inclusive movement with the participation of people of all religions and regions. Its underlying premise was pluralism and the concept of a Secular Democratic India, which bound all the people in the bonds of fraternity. Those who were for Muslim and Hindu nationalism kept aloof from this movement for ideological and political reasons.
Since the last few decades the Hindu nationalists have been claiming that they also participated in the (…)

From N.C.’s Writings
Last month was observed the twentyninth death anniversary of General Zia-ul-Haq, Pakistan’s third military dictator, who was killed in an air crash in that country in August 1988. Despite the repeated anti-US demonstrations in Pakistan today, the fact is that General Zia happened to be “an indispensable factor in the Pentagon’s scheme of things”, as noted in this incisive editorial N.C. had written on August 17, 1988 (it was published in the August 20, 1988 issue of (…)